I took the title for this course blog, “luminous allusion,” from this section of Emerson’s “American Scholar.” Emerson’s re-visioning of the action of reading–of pages of books coming alive–has long made me think, or speculate, that he would have been interested in electronic text. Here is the original passage (copied in from Emerson Central):

One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakspeare’s.

Emerson–as we started to discuss in class Wednesday, initial response to “American Scholar”–is interested in dynamic reading. Books have, potentially, the same problem as other “forms” (systems, churches, institutions)–they fix and fossilize what was once alive. So, Emerson wants books, but wants them not to be just books. I hear in his notion of the “inventor” and in the idea of “creative reading” that the reader in some way has to reproduce the ideas in the book. And reproduction makes me think in terms more familiar to our digital age: the read/write web, for example, where digital publishing makes the distinction between reader and writer much more fluid.

Two questions we might consider as we move forward–and dig further into American Scholar, Divinity School, and this larger notion of Emersonian reading as inventing. First question: what does digital communication and technology (this blog, the web) have to do with Emerson writing in the middle of the 19th century? Second question: What can we, writing and reading in the beginning of the 21st century do to approach or ‘reproduce’ this idea of an electronic Emerson–how best to read Emerson today in an Emersonian spirit?

To start with, Emerson is interested in communication. This is a significant thread in his thinking, something I tracked and traced in my studies of Emerson’s interest in photography–one of the technological revolutions of his age (more on that later in the semester). The idea of communication technology might strike readers’s ears discordantly–given the stereotype of transcendental Emerson out in nature. But we already see important ways that he focuses on “communication” and wants us to re-vise the ways we traditionally think about it. Books are a technology, a medium of communication. And in “American Scholar,” Emerson criticizes the book (and the reader) for not being flexible and fluid. One must be an inventor to read well. In “Divinty School,” you will notice that Emerson uses the word “communicating” and focuses on the problem of “historical Christianity” as communication error. [the pulpit pictured above is from the room in the Divinity School where he gave the address] There, too, he has in mind a ‘book’ and a ‘form’ that would offer flexibility to its readers; a book–or perhaps a better word, a text–that would be based in language (in effect what Emerson means by tropes) but not remain with those tropes. [in Nature, we will see this as the problem of fossil poetry]. Emerson wants a form or medium, in this case, in which the dynamic and provocative (and provocational) language of Jesus would not loose its electric current–would continue to charge and spark. Thus, in a lecture on “Eloquence” Emerson writes of the power of communication (oral and written) this way:

We are such imaginative creatures that nothing so works on the human mind, barbarous or civil, as a trope. Consense some daily experience into a glowing symobl, and an audience is electrified.

But fix that imagination of the language into a book (and put it on the shelf, in the basement of a library, say) and the tropes become monstrous. As you read on in Emerson, you will see him use the image of electricity and electric charge–an analogy that interests him greatly from the emerging science and natural philosophy of his day: electro-magnetism, polarity. There is an essay by Eric Wilson that digs into this a bit–I linked it on ‘research links’: “Emerson’s Metaleptic Style.”

Where and how, then, to take up this ‘electric’ current in Emerson today? My simple answer is that we can start to explore the potential for an Electronic Emerson. Later in the course, we will see the ways that Whitman scholarship is doing this, particularly through the Walt Whitman digital archive. For some reason (a question I am still asking Emerson scholars when I see them), Emerson scholarship has not followed suit in pursuing an Emerson digital archive. So, I am interested in exploring at least the question: if we were to do something digital with Emerson (create an Emerson 2.0)–what would you do and why? At a minimum, as you make your way into Emerson’s essays in the next few weeks, consider a simple way to track his electronic currents of thinking. You can use Emerson Central to keyword search through his texts, explore how certain words (luminous, form, inventor, thinking, divinity, character, inspiration) appear and re-appear in his texts. At the end of the Emerson writing project, my goal is for us to take advantage of some digital tools (still exploring how to do this–and hope you can help) that will enable us to (further) electrify your essays using an electronic medium.

Another experiment into flexible forms that might be of interest, if not use, for an Emersonian way of reading and writing and learning: I started a blog [learningmetonymy] that I use mostly to dumb research ideas and notes and texts, occasionally to send out ideas and see what happens; mostly to archive in a way that can begin to help me consider assocations and associational thinking (using the ‘tag’ feature of wordpress, for example). Here is a recent example in response to American Scholar, among other things. If you can make sense of what you see on the blog, by the way, do please let me know what that is.